The ordering and purchase of physical goods and services via the Internet is today commonplace. In the market for retail prepared foods, including fast-casual, quick-service, and full-service restaurants, consumers may place an electronic order with a retail food merchant via the Internet (“online ordering”), for example, through a web browser on a consumer computing device or through an application running on a consumer mobile computing device, for food to be delivered by the merchant or a third party to a specified location (“delivery”), or to be picked up by the consumer at the food merchant's retail location (“order ahead”). Online ordering systems may facilitate the consumer's payment for the goods or services through an Internet-based electronic transaction to a credit or debit card, or other payment source. Such online ordering services for retail prepared-food merchants are provided by a variety of third parties, each with proprietary systems and methods.
These known online ordering systems, including delivery and/or order-ahead systems, may enable a consumer to utilize a web browser or mobile application to select an item or items for purchase, customize items, select a time and location at which the consumer will pick up the item(s), and permit the consumer to initiate an electronic transaction (for example, using a credit or debit card) to make payment for the ordered item(s). The service or application (and associated web servers) used to accept the consumer's order via the Internet then may communicate the order to the retail food merchant's in-store point-of-sale (POS) and/or inventory system, or communicate the order to the merchant's retail location to another merchant computer systems or by some other means, such as telephone, email, or facsimile.
These known systems may be offered by third-party “aggregators” that enable Internet-based ordering at a variety of unaffiliated merchants. Such aggregator services vary widely in terms of merchant coverage, regional coverage, presence and quality of integration to (and communication with) a merchant's POS hardware and software, and also in terms of speed of order and/or delivery and cost to both consumer and merchant. Alternatively, the ordering system may be proprietary to the retail food merchant and/or a third party that provides branded software and technology to enable order-ahead features for the retail merchant. Such proprietary ordering systems generally require the consumer to utilize a channel proprietary to the retail food merchant, for example, the retail food merchant's website or mobile application, in order to place an advance order with that retail merchant. The lack of availability for an order-ahead solution across retail merchants, which includes the ability to communicate orders into the merchant's POS hardware and software as part of the merchant's normal ordering process, is a drawback of the current approach to order-ahead systems.
Known ordering systems as described above provide no opportunity for the retail merchant to track or correlate online ordering and purchasing behavior of a consumer with that consumer's ordering and purchasing behavior at the merchant's physical point of sale, either via transactions initiated using a mobile payment application of via a traditional credit card. Such systems also are unable to correlate the customer's online ordering behavior to purchases made at other retail merchants, either online or at physical POS terminals, whether initiated via mobile application or credit card, or online. Accordingly, conventional systems provide at best limited opportunity for temporal and/or item-based marketing, or predictive recommendations, to individual consumers.
Furthermore, known order-ahead systems generally require the consumer to pick up the goods at a specified time, as a consequence of the fact that retail prepared foods typically are delivered to the consumer shortly after a food item is prepared. Conventional systems therefore limit the consumer's ability to time the order pick-up to coincide with the consumer's arrival at the pick-up location. The consumer also remains unaware of the wait (or make) time at the food service locations, so has no basis for deciding between online ordering and ordering in person.